[Illustration:  THERE ARE BUILDING IN AMERICAN YARDS ]

I have already given reasons why, in the natural course of things, this disparity between the American and the British foreign-going merchant marine will not long continue.  And indeed, as this book is writing, it is apparent that its end is near.  Though shipyards have multiplied fast in the last five years of the nineteenth century, the first years of the new century found them all occupied up to the very limit of their capacity.  Yards that began, like the Cramps, building United States warships and finding little other work, were soon under contract to build men-of-war for Russia and Japan.  The interest of the people in the navy afforded a great stimulus to shipbuilding.  It is told of one of the principal yards, that its promotor went to Washington with a bid for naval construction in his pocket, but without either a shipyard or capital wherewith to build one.  He secured a contract for two ships, and capital readily interested itself in his project.  When that contract is out of the way the yard will enter the business of building merchant vessels, just as several yards, which long had their only support from naval contracts, are now doing.  There were built in the year ending June 30, 1901, in American yards, 112 vessels of over 1000 tons each, or a total of 311,778.  Many of these were lake vessels; some were wooden ships.  Of modern steel steamers, built on the seaboard, there were but sixteen.  At the present moment there are building in American yards, or contracted for, almost 255,325 tons of steel steamships, to be launched within a year—­or 89 vessels, more than twice the output of any year in our history, and an impressive earnest for the future.  Nor is this rapid increase in the ship-building activity of the United States accompanied by any reduction in the wages of the American working men.  Their high wages, of which ship-builders complain, and in which everyone else rejoices, remain high.  But it has been demonstrated to the satisfaction, even of foreign observers, that the highly-paid American labor is the most effective, and in the end the cheapest.  Our workingmen know how to use modern tools, to make compressed air, steam, electricity do their work at every possible point, and while the United States still ranks far below England as a ship-building center, Englishmen, Germans, and Frenchmen are coming over here to learn how we build the ships that we do build.  If it has not yet been demonstrated that we can build ships as cheaply as any other nation, we are so near the point of demonstration, that it may be said to be expected momentarily.  With the cheapest iron in the world, we have at least succeeded in making steel, the raw material of the modern ship, cheaper than it can be made elsewhere, and that accomplished, our primacy in the matter of ship-building is a matter of the immediate future.  A picturesque illustration of this change is afforded by the fact that in 1894 the plates of the “Dirigo,” the first steel square-rigged vessel built in the United States, were imported from England.  In 1898 we exported to England some of the plates for the “Oceanic,” the largest vessel built to that time.